London indie-pop quartet Fightmilk have been favourites around these parts ever since we swooned at their debut LP Not With That Attitude back in 2018. Their ability to match cutting sarcasm with big catchy tunes and their propensity for penning a pitch perfect sad banger made them an instant hit in Joyzine HQ.
Returning with their third album No Souvenirs, released this month via Fika Recordings, they’ve lost none of what first won us over and have added a bit of umami to the bitter-sweet flavours of their earlier work courtesy of a grungier edge and a DIY punk scowl on some of the tracks. There’s even a hint of capital r Rock in places – opener ‘Summer Bodies’ kicks things off with a riff that brings gum chewing anthem ‘Alright Now’ to mind.
Despite the wider musical palate it’s still unmistakably Fightmilk, with Lily Rae’s lyrics pivoting from railing against the unhealthy pressures placed on women’s appearance to being fired as a bridesmaid and tackling both with an equally sharp tongue. If you’re a fan of big indie-pop tunes sprinkled with equal helpings of glitter and grit, of songs that make you smile and cry and dance all at the same time or of lists of celebrity dogs, this could be the album for you.
We asked Lily, Alex, Healey and Nick to talk us through the tracks on the record.
Summer Bodies
For as long as women have had the temerity to exist, there have been rules about how we look. Everywhere we go there’s some kind of advertising telling us how to fit into this ideal. Here’s how to get your teeth whiter. Here’s how to sort out your ‘bad skin’. Here’s the best way to get rid of unwanted hair. Here’s a 12 week cardio programme that promises to make you thin. Here’s a grey goo you can drink to control your calories. Here’s the exact type of clothing you can wear so people don’t throw up when they look at you. It’s fucking insane and the only difference between 50 years ago and now is the word ‘health’. Everything’s for your health, and health looks like a slim, white, blonde, feminine, cis woman in a bikini. And if you don’t look like that, you’re supposed to hate yourself until you do. No thanks.
At one point in this song I ran out of things to say and just asked everyone to scream, so we all took turns unleashing them. That’s my favourite bit.
(Alex): I was revisiting the studio diary I kept while we recorded it, and had totally forgotten that one of Lily’s rejected mid-song adlibs was “I’ve eaten nothing but kale and pea smoothies and I still feel like shit!”
That Thing You Did
This started with the title. I think Alex wanted us to cover’ That Thing You Do’ for a show and I liked how ‘That Thing You Did‘ sounded really ominous and vengeful compared to how pop-heartbreak the original was, so I wrote the song from the viewpoint of somebody who’s just trying to move on from a bad relationship, but the ‘souvenirs’ in this case just won’t leave. As we were writing it, the meaning started oozing out without realising. And it’s about refusing to forgive somebody. Just because somebody says sorry, it doesn’t mean you have to accept it.
We kept banging our heads against ‘That Thing You Did’ for about eighteen months because we were trying to be too clever about it. We’ve lost a lot of good songs that way, but we all had faith in this one. The version you hear was recorded about half an hour after we nailed the arrangement, and Lily came back with a whole new chorus the next day just to cap it off – the only time we’ve ever finished a song in the studio.
Canines
(Lily) I was literally walking down my road to go and be a bridesmaid (again) when I got attacked by a dog. It bit my arse and ripped up my favourite jeans. I went and got a tetanus shot and some antibiotics and missed the ceremony – but I still made the reception! I was also really adamant that it wasn’t a metaphor (hence the line about it not being a metaphor) but it turns out that lots of people have turned it into their own metaphors for things anyway, so my butt and I are happy to oblige if you want to use the song as a metaphor.
(Nick) They say write about what you know, and Lily knows about being bitten on the arse by a dog. We wanted to get a kinda krautrocky, repetitive beat thing going for the verse that you could get a bit lost in, at the same time gradually upping the tension, so that when the chorus finally does come it feels like a real hit of catharsis and energy. It was great fun to layer and build it in the studio.
The dog names in the middle 8 was a pure placeholder that wasn’t meant to happen – it was a purely instrumental break for such a long time, but now it’s a chance to list every famous dog you know. Lily likes to go for a wander and quiz the audience on celebrity dogs when we play it live, so do brush up on this if coming to a Fightmilk show. Also our first (known) use of percussive panting.
(Alex) Word to the wise – never do a joke guitar solo when you’re putting a song together with a band. It will stick and you will be forced to repeat it every time you play the song.
Back From Tour
(Lily): This song feels to me about those fleeting moments of ‘maybe I should stop doing music and just be good at my day job’. Thankfully they’re always vanquished by the sheer joy of making music. Even when we’re all old and weird we’ll probably still feel compelled to do it. I plan to do it for ever.
(Nick) We’d played a couple of shows where we’d started going through the motions and were deep, deep in between album cycles. In a brief fit of ennui I was kind of at a point of wondering if I wanted to continue gigging. There’s a few songs on the album about being perceived as being too old to be marketable, but BFT is about the conflict of feeling like you’re wasting too much of your time/effort/life on your passion project and not being sure who it’s for. The original demo I sent the band has the bones of what this turned into, but it got a much needed restructure and injection of energy, not to mention the big cathartic yell-along at the end.
Yearning and Pining
(LW) a very stupid fun little song about having the horn. Again, the title kind of came first here and we didn’t have any songs that were straight-up romantic, so this is a bit of a tongue in cheek love song. But I like to think that it’s a universal experience! How awesomely painful it is being infatuated with someone, and how it’s not as magical anymore if it’s reciprocated.
Banger #7
(LW) I heard a second-hand story about a friend who almost gave up everything – their kids, their partner, their house, their job – to go and start again somewhere else with a whirlwind romance. And this is a bit about that secret desire. Holding your life together quietly for a long time, aching to go and be someone else for a bit. You know Milton in Office Space suddenly realising he could just set the building on fire? Yeah, that. The temptation to blow everything up and start anew.
No Souvenirs
This is a song about surviving a loved one’s death and what you do with the leftovers. In 2013 a close friend of mine died and it messed me up for a really long time. It took ten years to write about it in a way that felt right, because I kept trying to articulate him and couldn’t get it down on paper. So instead this song is about that balancing act of honouring a life whilst also trying to hold onto little bits of it. I kept everything – notes, letters, texts, even a packet of instant flan mix he sent me once as a weird joke – but at the back of my mind is the knowledge that it’s just stuff that I’ve given power. Souvenirs lose their meaning over time. The memory of him is really the only important thing.
It’s a sad song about death but I wanted it to sound huge and final, like I’m putting something to bed. Thankfully this was the year I got into Bleed American (I know, late to the game right?)
(AW) Lily’s original acoustic demo came attached with the note “Think we could make this sound like CHVRCHES.” which we should maybe try doing one day. But the second the lyrics registered, it didn’t seem like there was any other way to do this but emo(tionally). A friend told me this whole album sounds like the kind of stuff we grew up listening to on MTV2 or something. I kinda see what he means, but as far as this song’s concerned, he’s bang on.
Inferno
One of the last things written for the album. Alex started trying to do something Replacements-y in a weird tuning, Healey gave it a melody and some words, which Lily finished along with a dramatic middle 8 for good measure. This brings the album’s three-song heart of darkness to a close, thank god – I don’t think there’s any other Fightmilk lyric that makes us as sad as this one.
(HB) I’d had the lyrics for this one lying around for a while but I’d never really found a good home for them. They came about when I saw a post that was along the lines of ‘Holla if you’d have been called an abomination in the old testament’. We’re entering a really dark time in this country and globally, with worse and worse news stories every day. Despite how ridiculous and unfair it feels, there will always be bigots to fight. It’s ultimately a song about how some people are going to hate you for things you have no way of changing and the internal struggle with having to accept that.
My Best Me
They say write about what you know, and Lily also knows about being fired from bridesmaids duty.
Lily: I was invited to be a bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding, and then I was very much uninvited and it was a whole thing, which inspired this song (tl;dr look, she was engaged to a real chode). But it’s more about being on your best behaviour for certain crowds, and unable to be yourself. Anyway it’s extremely bratty and petulant. What better excuse for a song in drop D?
Alex: This was the first thing we wrote for the album, so it sort of set the agenda – louder guitars, stacks of harmonies, and a vocal take so ferocious we almost had to call off the next day’s recording. Also our first duelling guitar solo, which Lily and I tracked in the same room, pulling faces the whole time to try and throw the other one off.
Eating For Two
As mentioned, there’s a few songs that didn’t make the cut on this album because they’d have been a bit of a jarring direction shift. When we were going through a spate of that we decided to stop overthinking things and go back to basics, not try and be clever, and just play what felt good. This felt good!
Lily: I’d barely finished eating my leftover wedding cake when people started asking me when I was going to have kids. I’ve never been maternal and I’ve never wanted to be a mother, and the pressure just got more and more ridiculous (again – another handy side-effect of turning 30). There was a sense that no matter what I do with my life, nothing would validate my spot in society like having children. Whereas, obviously, men can just bop around doing whatever they want without anyone worrying about when they’re going to become dads.
This feels quite timely with JD Vance announcing his vendetta against ‘childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives’, so on behalf of all the childless cat ladies, I see you, and pick up some Dreamies when you’re next out.
(AW) Inspired by a chance encounter with a Sprints track on WFMU a couple of years ago. We’ve long wanted to write a song with barely any chords and a fucktonne of words. Lily just needed something big for those words to be about.
Paddling Pool
(Lily) I had extremely strong feelings about the ending of Never Have I Ever. I would’ve picked Paxton. Paxton has depth. Paxton has the only real character development. So this is about how I’d have picked Paxton.
(AW) We have a folder in our band Google Drive that’s loaded with phone demos that Lily has sent around over the years. As our unofficial musical archivist, Healey dusted this off from the virtual vault, and we turned it into this sorta…foggy folk song. I still have no idea what it’s about, but now I’m mostly wondering “Who the fuck is Paxton?”
30
Lily: I love this song to death. It sums up the whole album for me. It’s about coming to terms with everything, and celebrating it.
(AW) 30 might be the fastest we’ve ever pulled a song together. Lily had a rough recording of the first verse, which we played around with for about five minutes before realising it didn’t need much else. We threw second-verse lyric ideas back and forth in the practice space, made sure we all got quiet and loud at the same time, then asked Adrian (who mixes our records) to help us make it sound like the song was swallowing itself whole at the end.
No Souvenirs is out now via Fika Recordings on vinyl, CD and digital download – get it now from Bandcamp
Fightmilk: Facebook / Instagram / Bluesky / Bandcamp
Interview by Paul Maps
Photography by Carl Farrugia
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